In the front garden, giant thistles rattled in the breeze. The dry leaves cracked underfoot, loud as twigs, and the rosemary bush jabbed her as she squeezed past it. Had the place been this wild when she was here with Tommy, just a week ago?
She saw that the outside light had been left on, and felt an involuntary flicker of irritation then unease. Somehow, this sign of occupation unnerved her more than the pick-up truck. The window shutters were closed.
Before she could wimp out, Anna lifted the tarnished knocker and let it fall, before clasping her hands behind her back and arranging a smile.
No reply. She knocked again, louder, twice. She knew exactly how long it took to get to the front door from any point in the house. After a moment, she reached for the handle and slowly turned. The door opened with a smooth, silent action – she had spent a lot of money on that hardware. She peered around the frame.
‘Hola?’
The shuttered sitting room was dark but she could feel, instinctively, that there was no one there. She pushed the door a little wider, and as more light entered the room and shapes became distinct, she saw that the furniture had been rearranged. The two Knole sofas had been pushed together to form a bed, although the seats were different heights. A pillow and blanket from the bedroom cupboard lay folded at one end. The armchair had been pulled right up against the fireplace. On the floor was a pair of mattresses, barely thicker than towels. The air felt as if it had been stirred.
Anna stepped inside, leaving the door ajar, and her sense of unease merged into a forensic curiosity as she scanned the room. The flagstone tiles were gritty with dirt from outside. Lined up against the wall were three large, full, heavy-duty plastic bags – the tartan zip-up affairs sold in street markets – and several small rucksacks. A row of cheap sandals – she counted five pairs. Some toiletries and a plastic bag. She could smell that a fire had been lit recently; beside the grate were two of her saucepans and nestled in amongst the ashes were some tinfoil-covered objects. Potatoes?
On the bookshelf, two phones sat charging. Beside them, a book – The Hours – was pulled two inches out of its neat row, as if someone had quickly thought better of reading it. And hanging from the mantelpiece, looped around one of Michael’s attempts at sculpture – a small abstract nude in clay – was what looked like a primitive necklace, with three little leather pouches tied onto a string.
This sign of a possible feminine presence reminded Anna of Mattie. Was it possible she’d been up here too? She crept across the kilims to check the other rooms. The guest-room bed was neatly made up, a pile of clothes folded on the chair, a smear of toothpaste on the Moroccan basin. In her room, the bedspread was half pulled onto the floor. The sight of it, fresh from someone else, gave her a lurch; a similar sense of queasy wrongness as when someone wears your shoes.
In the bathroom, a desiccated bunch of wild flowers sat forgotten on the windowsill; they must have been there a year. A bottle of shower gel sat balanced on the bath ledge, in front of the broken tiles. What must the men think of them? They now seemed a ridiculous affectation. There was a tidemark of dirt around the bath; unusually dark. What had they been doing? She noticed that the light switch was also smudged with dirt, and a blackened towel lay on the floor.
She left the house quickly, pulling the door closed and walking briskly down the path, this time not bothering to avoid the gravel. As she was passing the rosemary bush, she heard something and froze. Voices. They seemed to be coming from beyond the almond grove.
Before she had time to consider whether it was a good idea, she stepped off the path, pushing past the bushes and onto the terrace. The almond trees were bare of leaves and their white trunks were slender, offering little cover, but still she darted from one to the other as she moved quietly through the grove, weeds brushing her as she passed. Beyond the grove was the hill that marked the edge of the finca’s land; linking the two areas was a small plain, where she and Michael had kept their short-lived chickens.
Before Anna saw anything, she smelled damp, mineral soil and heard the sound of metal striking earth. Slowing down, she crept forward, until she could glimpse the plain. The chicken wire of the abandoned coop – an ambitious two-floored structure she had built herself – came into view, and then, near to it, the top half of a man. His T-shirt was covered in smears of dark brown, and he was talking and gesticulating to unseen friends in a foreign language. She leaned forward further, clutching onto two tree trunks for support, and saw that the man was standing in a hole, about a metre wide.
Anna looked at the hole, and the man, and the marks on his T-shirt. Then she swung around and retraced her steps, picking up speed until she was springing through the grove as nimbly as a deer, barely panting. In no time she cleared the almond grove, and the gate came into view. The cab driver was waiting, staring into space. Anna dived into the back seat and pulled the door shut.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
She sat quiet and still until they reached the safety of the pine forest, and then she leaned forward to speak to the driver.
‘Actually, can we go back to a different address?’
5
Marea Village Residential Caravan Park, where Mattie lived, was situated on the ring road, near the big supermarkets. Anna knew of the place but had never been there: she’d had no reason to. Although always quick to accept an invitation, Mattie had, to Anna’s knowledge, never hosted anyone herself. Nor had Anna, come to that. They had tacitly excluded themselves from the expats’ endless social reciprocity: Anna with the excuse of running the bar; Mattie, her ill mother and eccentricity.
The cab dropped Anna off beside the entrance sign. Small letters under the name stated that the park was a retirement community, for over-fifties only. Aha, Anna thought: a clue to Mattie’s age. (But Jesus – in a decade, she too would be eligible to live here.)
Beyond the gates were three wide thoroughfares each lined with large static caravans, scores of them stretching into the distance, as uniform and tightly spaced as modern cemetery plots. Anna found a prefab reception block, which doubled as a shop and cafe. A man with eye bags like blisters took a lunch order from a table of four – ‘Mash, roast, chips or jacket?’ he asked each diner in turn – before telling her where to find Mattie.
Following his directions, Anna felt conspicuous on foot; judging from the other traffic on the site, mobility scooters were de rigueur, even for those at the younger end of the Marea Village demographic. Everyone here seemed to know each other, hailing those they passed or slowing to a halt to yak. They seemed different from the urbanization expats, Anna thought; breezier, less strained. She supposed it was because they didn’t own property; they had the levity of people with little to lose.
Each caravan was around forty feet long, clad in dun-coloured uPVC, with a kitchen under an adjoining awning and a small patch of outside space. Almost all were hooked up with satellite dishes, and the sound of individual TVs merged as Anna went by. Passing one caravan, she heard a startling, guttural cackle from inside; from another came the smell of frying fish. Although a few of the caravans looked unoccupied, their white plastic outdoor chairs tilted against their table and still dusted red from the calima, the park appeared pretty full. Anna supposed that many of them were used as holiday homes, and now was when UK-based retirees came over to warm their bones, heading back home again during the unbearably hot summer months. Swallows, they were called.
A few inhabitants had personalized their plots with strings of lights and garden ornaments, but no one had gone as far as Mattie. Unit 443 was conspicuous from a distance: the outside space laid with AstroTurf, bordered with pinwheels and plastic flamingos. She had even squeezed in a freestanding pond, although it was empty, its blue plastic lining pathetically revealed. A few feet away, her neighbours, an ancient couple, sat in recliners under an awning, watching a TV fixed-up outside. The woman was wearing a strapless dress, her breasts like cushions on her lap. She smiled as Anna knocked on Mattie’s door.
Within seconds there was Mattie, in a peach kimono.
‘Anna!’ she gasped, in overblown, delighted surprise.
Twinkling at her, Mattie leaned against the door frame, clutching its edge with one green-nailed hand. Her black sheet of hair hung to her waist, and the neckline of her kimono dropped almost as far; it was the kind of thing Anna had only seen before in 1940s films, or East London burlesque nights. There was a grease stain near its hem. From inside the caravan, Anna heard snoring. Mattie’s disabled mother?
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Mattie.
It was a good question, and Anna hadn’t prepared a reasonable excuse, as she would have done with someone else. She’d assumed that Mattie would take the visit in her stride: after all, she rarely questioned anything, seemed oblivious to social conventions.
‘I . . . Sweeney mentioned that you talked to one of the guys who’s staying up at my place. Last night. At the karaoke?’
Mattie sighed dramatically.
‘Darling Almamy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I suppose we did do a bit of talking, yes,’ said Mattie.
Without make-up Mattie’s face was even more oddly ageless; egg-like in its lack of pores and lines and shadow. Her eyes were faintly Asiatic and had very clear whites; you’d think she was a non-drinker.
‘Did he mention what they were doing up at the finca?’ said Anna. ‘What was going on up there?’
Mattie cocked her head to one side.
‘Did they mention digging a hole?’ said Anna, feeling stupid. ‘Like for a vegetable patch, or something?’
Mattie laughed. ‘A vegetable patch?’
‘Mattie, this is important.’
‘No,’ said Mattie, looking at her. ‘We didn’t talk about vegetable patches.’
There was a cough from inside the caravan. Anna had vaguely assumed that Mattie had brought the man, Almamy, back here, but could this be true? Marea Village offered as little privacy as a festival campsite.
‘Where did you go with him?’ asked Anna. ‘Did you go up to the finca?’
Mattie paused, before leaning towards her.
‘I went to Senegal,’ she said, in a stagey whisper. ‘And I tell you, Anna, there’s no going back.’
Anna shuddered, visibly, at the vulgarity, and Mattie clocked it. Her eyes narrowed, and in her look Anna realized that whilst Mattie might have appeared impervious to how others saw her, at this moment at least, she was not. She knew exactly what Anna was thinking of her.
Then Mattie smiled, and said, in an artificial, singsong voice, ‘So, do you like my place?’
‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ said Anna, just wanting to get away.
‘I know!’ said Mattie, as if the thought had just occurred to her. ‘You should come and live here! Malcolm says there are a few plots going. People keep dying. One in, one out. I think you’ll fit right in.’
Anna couldn’t help herself, even though she knew she was lobbing Mattie an easy ball.
‘I’m not old enough, actually,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ replied Mattie pointedly.
Anna admitted defeat. She turned to leave, pushing open the pointless little gate in the miniature picket fence around the caravan and striding out into the park, speeding up until she was outpacing the mobility scooters. What a waste of time. Why did she expect any more from Mattie?
Furious, she marched home, barely registering her surroundings as she passed through the dark, narrow back roads of the town and emerged into the clean, open space of the square. Back at the bar, she sat at the counter and tried to calm down. She should call Simón again. But then she thought of their last conversation, his sharp, unsolicited warning against entering the property without permission. She should arm herself first.
So, instead, she called her abogado; the property lawyer she had dealt with when buying the bar. No reply. She pulled out her laptop and tried to get online to find another one, but the Internet was down. She scrabbled through the pile of papers behind the bar to find an old copy of the local English-language newspaper. Under the banner, Everything Under the Sun!, the back pages were dense with classified ads, tersely worded to come in as cheap as possible. GARDENING, E5/hour. VILLA CLEANING, cheapest around. ODD JOBS – will do anything. Tiling, airport transfers, pool maintenance, TV repairs, pet sitting, tennis tuition, cookery lessons, Zumba classes, AA meetings, British Legion events, house clearance, spare rooms, eBay listings. Then, For Sale: villas, bungalows, apartments, bakeries, bars, cars, jet skis, golf clubs, freestanding BBQs, plasma TVs, phones, dogs, puppies, dog baskets, fridge freezers, toasters, Soda Streams, hair straighteners, baby clothes bundles, crystal vases.
Standing out, pricily boxed in black, were the recession-proof services. Funeral directors (specialists in repatriation). Dentists. Pawnbrokers. Get instant access to the latest bank repossessions. And lawyers.
She called one at random and, when a woman answered, started to explain the situation.
‘I will stop you there,’ said the woman, her tone weary. The fee for a phone consultation, she explained, was thirty euros for fifteen minutes, ‘in English.’
‘Can we do it in Spanish for twenty?’ said Anna, digging out her card. The woman was intractably silent until Anna had read out her details and the payment had gone through.
Then, she said, ‘Is it in your tenancy agreement to prohibit digging on the land?’
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Anna, triumphantly. ‘We never signed anything. It was just a conversation.’
‘What did you say in your conversation?’
‘Just how long he would stay, and the rent.’
‘Well, you know, a verbal tenancy agreement is as binding as a written one.’
Anna swivelled on her stool, astonished.
‘Even with no witnesses?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘That is our law.’
‘That’s fucked up!’
‘Has the tenant been paying rent?’ the lawyer continued, blandly.
‘Well, the first month, yes.’
‘It’s very difficult to evict a tenant here,’ the woman said. ‘The law is on their side.’ She explained that rent had to be unpaid for six months before proceedings could even begin, and that if Anna went onto the premises without permission, or shut off any utilities, she could be prosecuted for harassment. So, Simón hadn’t been bluffing.
‘If you believe you have grounds for damage to your property, we can begin proceedings,’ the lawyer said. ‘But I advise you, it will take a long time.’
‘How long?’
‘A year, at least, to get to the first court,’ the woman said, and, unprompted, added that her fees from here on in would be eighty euros an hour. Anna couldn’t tell whether the lawyer’s abject lack of encouragement to press the case was born from kindness or, like a boutique assistant easing an expensive bag from the hands of a window shopper, because she had divined that Anna couldn’t possibly afford it. In any case, the woman was efficient: with seven minutes remaining on the clock there seemed little else to say.
Anna finished the call and yelped with frustration. Whatever this faceless woman said, it was simply impossible that there was no recourse against a stranger desecrating her property. The law seemed insignificant beside the profound injustice of the situation.
All that time and effort and money, she thought. She had poured everything she had into that place. Not just money – all that love and care. She had polished the bathroom window’s tiny brass latch with cotton buds, massaged the terracotta plant pots with yoghurt to give them an aged look. That place was hers, in the same way that her body was hers. How could she have been so careless, letting strangers in there?
With nowhere to go, her rage started to ebb. Suddenly, desperately, she needed comfort and found herself calling her mother. Janet answered cautiously. The TV was on in the background.
‘Hello, darling,’ said Janet, almost warmly, when she heard Anna’s voice. ‘I was wo
ndering when you’d call. Let me turn this down.’
‘Well, you could have called me.’
‘Oh, you’re always so busy. I never know when’s best to catch you.’
Anna felt the familiar bolshy hurt beginning to brew and, when she spoke again, her tone was clipped.
‘Can I ask you something,’ she said. ‘A friend of mine is having an issue with their tenants. They’ve damaged the property and are refusing to leave. Didn’t you have a problem with some couple once?’
‘The ones in Cheltenham?’ said Janet. ‘Who stole the bath panel?’
‘I can’t remember,’ said Anna. ‘Yeah, I think them. What happened in the end?’
‘Well, they were a nightmare, weren’t they?’ Anna heard a faint grunt and realized Janet was directing her comment to Bill, beside her on the sofa, as ever. ‘We had to go through the courts, it took months. They wanted to be forcibly evicted so they could get a council house. Don’t you remember? I lost half a stone. Terrible. And people think it’s easy money.’
‘My friend doesn’t want to take the legal route,’ Anna said.
‘Has she tried talking to them?’ said Janet. ‘We’ve found that issues can usually be diffused by a calm discussion.’
‘Of course she has!’ said Anna.
Janet gave a meaningless mmmm in reply, and Anna imagined her mother’s gaze fixed on the muted TV, next to an impatient Bill. Suddenly, again she felt herself welling up.
Under the Sun Page 10